In The Service of Truth
by Thelwell
Summary: CJ's not the only one who needs to relearn things. CJ/Danny post-finale.


She doesn't believe in truth any more.

It's possible that she never really did, she's not idealistic in quite the same way as Sam or the President - that is, she lives for ideals and dreams and the belief that they can be possible, but she's also learnt to live with the understanding that she is not omnipotent, and that sometimes, in her patch of the world, it isn't possible.

Honesty was never one of her main ideals, anyway.

She told a guy in an interview once that it was the aim of the Press Secretary to tell the truth, if at all possible. What she didn't explain was that it was like tilting at windmills. Telling the truth, in its sheerest, most honest form, was impossible, impractical, more harmful than a pack of lies. Technical accuracy was nothing next to the theme and spirit of honesty. As Press Secretary she told the press what the White House felt they needed to know, and that was often honest but it was rarely truthful and never the whole truth. As Chief of Staff she decided what the press and the Press Secretary needed to know, and in that position she knew that the truth would do the people no good at all. For years she has lied to a Press Corps and to a country that believes the opposite.

She believes in America. She really does. Her impossible dream, her country, pro patria.

And she believes in freedom, and democracy, and once, years ago now, she believed in welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.

She believes, has faith, in people.

But she can't quite believe in honesty. Can't quite trust her people and her country to understand the truth of what a functioning democracy means. Can't quite trust the truth for the misconceptions that it hides.

And this is a problem.

Because Danny really did. He believed in the absolute worth of truth and that honesty is always better in the long run. He believed that a free press in the service of real truths could keep his country honest and good. He believed that the populace would listen to the truth and care about the truth and be informed enough to understand it. And now he's a little bit broken, like she is, because he's seen too much truth and he's seen the lack of understanding and it's sickened him.

He was always a journalist of integrity, truth for the sake of the people's best interests rather than for their prurient voyeurism. The problem is, of course, that there is so little distinction between them. To believe and worship the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is to disregard pragmatics. Technically, Doug Westin's affair was a matter of great interest to the public - it may have said little about his ability to govern, but it said a lot about his character, and so, perhaps, his worth as a representative of the people. In the spirit of truthfulness, Doug Westin's affair wasn't gutter press. It was sordid, it was dirty, and it was beneath Danny, but it wasn't actually irrelevant. The difference between that and Hollywood's musical genitalia was subtle: both were distasteful, but one was prompted by the belief that people should know what they enjoyed knowing, and the other that they should know what would affect themselves and their country. To believe in the power of press in a democracy is to believe that the populace should know their representatives truthfully, and while Doug Westin's affair shouldn't have been important, it should have been known.

She doesn't actually believe that.

But Danny did, once upon a time. And seeing the logical extreme of his life's goal has driven home that he doesn't believe it any more.

And how can she go on, not believing in truth, when what Danny wants above all things is to have that faith back?

And so, one day, when his odd new brand of waiting is too much for her to bear, and she can't hide behind work because this problem isn't going away, she does what he taught her to do, and she tells him secrets. Not real secrets, state secrets, for her belief in her country is strong enough to muzzle her, and even if it wasn't, Toby has scarred her for life. But she tells him past thoughts, real and unvarnished, and it kills her to bare herself in this way, but she does it anyway. She tells him about horrible lies she's had to tell, about realities she's had to deny. Tells him about the weight of dishonesty, the theme and spirit of spin. Tells him about the times she would've given anything to tell the truth, the times that concealment and slant and omission have mutilated truth and made it something shiny and ugly and horrific and necessary.

He understands what she's doing, and for a time her selfless punishment is the only thing he can see. He loves so strongly in those moments: this woman and her misguided, quixotic attempt to sacrifice herself for him.

But it doesn't work.

He loves the truth. He always has. He's been to countries with controlled press and biased press and no damn press at all. He's come across myths and propaganda and revisionist history. He's examined spin from every angle and seen cracks in the armour so festering that it's a travesty that more people don't see them as well. He understands the value of truth very well. And he's spent years watching this woman, he knows what it does to a person to open your mouth to speak the truth and see every ear in the room hear only the ugly lie. He really does understand.

It doesn't help.

Because he was a servant of truth, as she was a servant of politics. He helped his country by being honest and truthful, as she did by being pragmatic. Oh, he thought about what he published, to be sure, and he sat on more than a few unnecessary or untimely discovered truths, but at heart his goal and his reason was always the pursuit of that truth. He knows people who died in that pursuit. He knows the Press Secretaries love their 'front line' war metaphors, and he knows she's spent years and sorrows and stresses in the Situation Room, but he also knows that the first casualty of conflict is the truth. And he's spent years in defence of it. The foot soldier of an ideal he feels betrayed by. The seductive quality of that ideal hardly makes him feel better. He feels betrayed by it, and by the inability of the populace to understand it, and all the false attractions just remind him how deeply he believed and how deeply he was betrayed.

He needs something new. Something to believe in.

She's lost her previous life, and her previous allegiances, but she's still a servant of politics – now she serves the world instead of merely her impossible dream of a country. He's lost his previous life, but there's nothing in its place. And he looks back at all he's accomplished, and he thinks, she's waded through an awful lot of muck, and she's got so very little to show for it, but she's got a path of trying. She's shaped the world. And he thinks, do I? Because his work is similarly muddy, but so much more ephemeral. He can shout the truth from the rooftops, but it's the people who take his work and make it real. It seems so bitterly unfair that she, who has faith in people, should do things for them, while he, who doesn't trust the populace at all, should need them to do things for themselves. There's no point in finding the truth if no one will listen.

And the worst thing is that it's sullied his love of language too.

He still loves the idea of writing, the memory of it. He still loves the slow clack of the keyboard and the horizontal patterns of symbols running across the screen. He still loves books with their satisfying weight and the way that pages feel if you rest hundreds pressed together against the pad of your thumb. He loves punchy, witty headlines, and philosophical titles, and the ink and graphite and calluses on his fingers. He loves spoken language, with real rhythm and scan and the joy of language used as much for its sound as for its meaning, and the way it feels funny when tongue and teeth and mouth and lips form the air into something meaningful and beautiful. He loves that concepts undefined and unnamed are rarely built upon - loves that naming things makes them real, in a web of relationships more complicated than any mathematical model. He loves the words used a thousand times daily, and words that everyone has to look up. He loves forgotten words, and funny words, and composite words, and words stolen from other languages and utterly barbarized by English use. He loves the history of words and the meaning of words, loves their origins, and loves the lyrical twist of a sentence that makes it memorable. He even loves the morning papers, still, with their addictive sentences, one leading to another until a paragraph read while the kettle boils becomes page 53, beneath the fold.

But every time he starts to actually write, he remembers that words are just tools. That while he loves language as much as Toby Ziegler and Sam Seaborn and Will Bailey, they are all just twisting words to their own purpose. And it makes him hate words, for being so easy and so malleable, so accessible, and so completely without principle. He thinks of taboo words, and he thinks of non-pc words, and he thinks - serves you right. Serves you right for allowing yourselves to be used in this way. And then he feels ashamed. Because the words are powerless, man-made, and it feels a little like blaming a victim for being raped.

He still loves words, but he can't bear the thought of them. He thinks of a good phrase, and likes the sound of it, but when he says it again it feels pointless. And he still sees the stories, still notices the tip-offs, still feels which would be the right questions to be asking, but he can't pursue them. He finds himself writing articles in his head, or planning a way to check up on a theory, and his fingers feel odd from lack of use, and he itches to reach for the phone and set things in motion. But then he visualises it in print, jerking his head away to dispel the image, and desperately thinks of something else. Sometimes he sings, in the privacy of his own head, mental voice ruthlessly pushed along the train tracks of pre-written lyrics, anything to stop his other voices from writing the news.

It feels a little like embarrassment, and a little like shame. Everything is associated with a very public and personal mistake. He was one of the best, and he lost his faith. He knows it wasn't right because he completely finished doing it wrong.

Most of the time life is good, a new start in the California sunshine, and he'll flick past news channels and occasionally, very occasionally, get to wake up with CJ because she didn't wake up first. But sometimes he can't see beyond the betrayal and it makes him feel sick, and he doesn't want to dwell on it and he doesn't want to talk about it, and he can't do what he's good at, so what can he do? He appreciates what CJ is trying to do and he loves her for it, but he wishes that she would stop, wishes they could pretend everything is fine, and he racks his brain to find a way to make her back off in this one circumstance without dishonouring her attempt or making her back off completely.

But he lies next to her on the bed as she talks, and their shoulders touch as they stare at the ceiling, and he lifts an arm against gravity, locked at the elbow, and pretends to hold the overhead light in his fingertips.

And he's trying not to listen, but she's CJ, and he can't help but listen to her. So he drops his arm and it bounces slightly as it hits the mattress between them, and he turns his head to look at her.

And she's staring at him. She's watching him desperately with those wide eyes and trying not to show it. For years it's been the other way around, it feels odd to be the one watched now.

He was supposed to be the one who knew what he was doing. He presented himself truthfully, that second date, a little bit broken, a little bit less whole than their year of courtship years before. But they glossed over that, together, glossed over the dreadful waiting that he had been doing those last few months of her in office. Because he was waiting as much for inspiration as for her. And when she came to him, when she chose him and when she needed him to teach her how to do this he had been whole enough. He had been whole enough because she needed him.

But he's not whole, not really. And she still needs him. And she's desperate because he's always been so sure, so devoted, so knowing, and now he's drifting, and she doesn't know how to cope with drifting. And she's still talking, lips painting pictures in the air above them while her eyes never leave his face. Hoping for a reaction, any reaction, because it's unusual and unnatural to have this silence between them.

She thinks maybe her demons are easy compared to his. The ones that bother her most are obvious, inescapable, and possible to attack as a pair. His are internal and personal and essential to his being. And she's doing everything she can to fight an enemy that doesn't exist, and to shore up a dam on her own and with nothing. He doesn't talk, and she's trying to fill the silence with words because if there's one thing she can do, she can talk. It took her a while to relearn but she's good at it now, but he knew how to do it all along and is silent. She's forced into half-truths and misrepresentations once again, seeking to reassert his faith in a concept he knows well she doesn't believe in. And he's still listening and she's still talking, and this is the fifth such one-sided conversation they've had, and it's so uncharacteristic for him to avoid her eyes, and when he does meet them his eyes are open and utterly without spark.

He can't listen any more, so he reaches over and touches her cheek. Her words falter and stop, dried up now that he has joined their conversation, even though he's speaking in silence.

He can't talk. Can't use the words tainted by the treachery of truth. So he focuses on her instead, his bright, beautiful, vibrant star, hand moving from cheek to trace her nose from bridge to tip, fingers hovering over her lips but unable to touch (those lips and those fingers that are their tools for their language and their sacrifices to truth). He smooths the slight wrinkles to the side of her mouth instead, and runs the back of his hand lightly along the side of her jaw and onto her neck, long and shadowed and lined. And then, because there are tears in her eyes and he can't bear that he's hurting her, he heaves his shoulders up from flat against the mattress to rest on one elbow and leans over and kisses her ear.

They've neither of them beautiful ears. Not dainty or neat, but they belong to her, and so they are the only ears he'd ever consider perfect. He can't tell her that he knows what the truth cost her too, can't tell her that those times she opened her mouth to tell the truth and knew it entered ears a lie that his ears were clear. That he listened to her character and events as much as he listened to her lies of word and her lies of body. He can't tell her that he hears all she said, and that it doesn't solve a thing. Can't tell her that he's listened to her for years and for the first time he wishes that she'd shut up. He believes in words and he believes in talking things out and he once believed in truth, but there are some things that cannot be said. And so he kisses her ear, carefully, like a benediction, knowing that the other is wet and salty with her worry. He kisses it in thanks for the listening that he can't stand and apology that he can't stand it. Kisses it in apology and admission that his words - that he wanted them to talk - have been made a lie. Kisses it because he's been listening to her for years and because she's trying desperately to listen to him now. And he kisses it, because no matter how many times he lies that he's okay, that he's fine, these ears don't fail her, and she hears the truth behind the words.


End file.
